Am I glowing yet?

There are certain things that can happen during pregnancy and childbirth that those misty-lens commercials don't show. Did you ever notice that the women on ads for pregnancy tests or other pregnancy-related products are thin and small, with perfectly round basketball-like bellies? They never show the ridiculously huge bellies (like mine), women who were plus-size pre-pregnacy, women with lop-sided bellies, ligthening-like bright red stretchmarks,... . And why should they? Those things aren't delicate and therefore not commercially feminine. But what I'd like to know is, who ever categorized motherhood as delicate? For God's sake, a woman grunts, screams, and pushes to get a baby to tear through her vagina, or she has to be cut open with her guts out for all to see, in order to bring a child into this world. Delicate? I think not.

Before I am done being pregnant, I want to lay my cards out on the table. There are so many things that I have experienced or that friends have gone through that are not generally spoken of and are sometimes not even found in pregnancy books. So here it is. For each of these, I know 2 others people or more who have confided that they have also experienced these not-so-delicate things during pregnancy:

• unpredictable and frequent belching
• dandruff
• excess facial hair
• uncontrollable peeing on the bathroom floor during violent vomiting
• excess sweating and b.o.
  
• dried orange stuff (colostrum) stuck in one's nipples

And that is the short list. Plus, there are so many more things that people have told me about, but I don't want to post them here because I feel a moral obligation to stick with things that I myself have experienced, so as not to embarass anyone else. I guess we are not supposed to talk about these things because they are, again, not delicate.

But now to the most important part of this post, the answer to the title question: Am I glowing yet? Yes, I think I am and have been for quite some time. I am growing 2 babies- how could I not glow? Yes, I feel disgusting at times, especially after projectile vomiting. But a lot of the time I look at myself and my body and am quite amazed, and I will not let a few chin hairs obscure the big picture, thank you very much. Those basketball-bellied ladies in the misty television lens have nothing on me. Don't let them get to you, either. Afterall, they too may be puking their guts out in between takes.